How Methods Videos Are Making Science Smarter

Robert Fernandez’s step-by-step video for an experiment on the social behavior of fruit flies is one of many methods videos available on the Web sites of science journals.

Yale University’s Robert Fernandez prepared the lab bench for the camera as a chef might arrange his mise en place, deftly laying out a mini vortex, a fly aspirator, a T-maze, and a thermometer. Step by step, in a precisely edited sequence, Fernandez and his colleagues demonstrated an experiment on the social behavior of fruit flies. The video showed how to anesthetize the flies in ice, how to use the aspirator to collect them, how to agitate some of them in the churning vortex to provoke a stress reaction, and how to manipulate the maze elevator to the choice point, such that the unagitated flies would be encouraged to choose between the two sides of the T shape—a vial recently vacated by their stressed brethren, or a fresh vial. Agitated flies, it turns out, leave behind an odorant that calmer flies instinctively shun. As Anne Simon, the designer of the protocol, told me, the research was designed to improve the understanding of psychiatric illnesses and asocial disorders such as autism, in part by isolating certain genes in those flies that didn’t display normal avoidance behaviors.

Fernandez’s study was filmed, produced, and eventually published, last December, by the Journal of Visualized Experiments. Founded in 2006, JOVE now has a database of more than four thousand videos, with about eighty more added each month. They are usually between ten and fifteen minutes long, and they range in subject from biology and chemistry to neuroscience and medicine. “For a scientist trying to explain a methodology in writing, it’s very difficult to describe all the necessary details of a multi-stage technical process,” JOVE’s co-founder, Moshe Pritsker, told me. “Confusion over the smallest details can result in months of lost effort.” Replicability—researchers’ capacity to reproduce their colleagues’ experimental findings in order to build on them—is a bedrock principle of scientific progress. But copying an experiment often requires visiting the original lab and seeing it performed. Simon’s fruit-fly protocol, for instance, demands that various minutiae be precisely tuned—lighting, temperature, humidity, and even whether you’ve cut new vials from their plastic bags far enough in advance to let out the stale air. “Video makes replication more efficient,” Pritsker said.

The videos can be of particular help to researchers who are not naturally aware of the dexterity that a specific laboratory procedure requires. As Jonathan Butcher, of Cornell’s School of Biomedical Engineering, put it, “Not everybody is intrinsically a good gardener.” Recently, for example, Butcher’s colleagues sent him an e-mail indicating with skepticism that they couldn’t replicate some of his results. The procedure in question required gently swabbing off cells from the lining of blood vessels in the valves of the heart. When Butcher invited the researchers to his lab and watched them try it, he realized that they were oblivious as to how to do it delicately. “They just thought that scraping is scraping,” he said. After they observed a visual demonstration, they were able to replicate the procedure. Rather than repeating this process for numerous investigators, Butcher published a video in JOVE. Since then, he hasn’t been contacted by other doubters. Indeed, Pritsker said, the journal’s sweet spot is anything that requires animal surgery, in which the convenience of visuals veers toward necessity.

Since 2013, JOVE_’s_ user base has grown by thirty per cent per year, and last year the journal, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, opened subsidiaries in London and Melbourne. Other scientific publications have also begun to produce methods videos, including Current Protocols, Nature Protocols, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of Medical Insight, the last of which, begun in earnest in late 2013, publishes videos of surgical techniques for attending surgeons, residents, and medical students. The medium’s rising popularity has been spurred on by the so-called replication crisis, itself partly a result of the growing sophistication and interdisciplinary nature of life-science research. (On Friday, an article in Science made clear that a similar problem exists in psychology. When a large group of researchers tried replicating a hundred experiments, they were able to draw statistically significant findings from only thirty-six of them.)

To Pritsker, the most significant obstacle to the successful replication of experiments is the outdated text format of traditional journals: it simply can’t cope with how elaborate experiments have become. “Complexity was always an issue,” he said. “Even when biology was a much smaller enterprise, it relied on a degree of specialized craft in the laboratory. But, since the end of the nineties, we’ve seen a huge influx of new technologies into biology: genomics, proteomics, technologies like microarrays, complex genetic methods, and sophisticated microscopy and imaging techniques.” With every innovative technique, application, or new vender selling a similar but slightly different technology or reagent, the potential for experiment-spoiling variation rises. Nathan Blow, the editor of the methods journal BioTechniques, agreed. Video, he said, can be a useful way of recording a precise recipe.

The consumption of methods videos remains modest compared with that of traditional, print-only journals. Poorly conceived videos can be as unhelpful as inscrutable text, of course, and no video will fully substitute for an in-person demonstration. They also aren’t as cheap to produce as standard journal articles, and there have been complaints about JOVE_’s_ pricing structure. One point of concern is publication costs: researchers pay twenty-four hundred dollars to produce a video that is available only to subscribers, and forty-two hundred dollars for an open-access video.

In his book “The Checklist Manifesto,” from 2009, the surgeon and New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande argues that, in medicine and other fields, “the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” He points to the need for different strategies in managing this new complexity, and his suggestion of checklists, fittingly, was recently adopted by the journal Nature to insure that experimental details are fully reported. JOVE_’s_ success reflects another winning strategy in the same broader struggle, as the way in which experts share increasingly intricate knowledge is forced to adapt, unavoidably, to the dizzying proliferation of new protocols and technologies.

Jamie Holmes is a fellow at New America. His book “Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing” is out in October.

Video

Puffed: The Magic of Cereal

Breakfast cereal—typically made of puffed, extruded, or flaked grains—is a quintessentially American invention. Here, Dave Arnold and the Museum of Food and Drink team demonstrate the puffing gun, which débuted at the 1904 World’s Fair, in St. Louis, Missouri.